


You Go Now, Brother

by Zagzagael



Category: Deadwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-29
Updated: 2011-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-20 20:39:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coda S1.12 - The Doc returns from a delivery to Mr. Wu's pigs...</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Go Now, Brother

When he returned from Wu’s pig sties, the two men were waiting for him. Over the rims of his spectacles, they were reminiscent of thin wraiths in black. Flanking the low door to his clinic. He nervous-licked the long hairs of his moustache out of his mouth, lowered his head and kept walking. He should have expected this and his inner demon tormented him viciously for overlooking it. Why did he have to be so scattered? He had become the type of man pitied and laughed at in medical school. Nervous as a wet colt, distracted, eyes focusing on distant cures, mind continually running through a litany of the illnesses that fed on the life force. He had somehow become the befuddled, his sharp brain honed to a wetted glint but his waistcoat buttoned wrong. Yet, they needed him, didn’t they? He was the magician in the dark carnival of their diseases, rotting flesh, flayed skin, broken bones, and brain lesions. Yes, the failed and faltering illusionist who had no trick hidden up his sleeve; men died, women withered, wounds wept, legs twisted, unborn babies slid on bloody passages into daylight. And holy men went mad.

“Gentlemen,” his voice gruff but he could hear the shaking in it and wondered if they would as well.

Bullock side-stepped into his path, blocking him. The other sighed. Amos had come to recognize this wordless breathing as some sort of secret language Starr shared with his imposing partner. He watched Bullock’s hands clench and relax at his side, responding to the breathing intonations of the Jew.

He stopped short, slow to look up, still worrying at the moustache hairs with the broad tip of his tongue. He pushed his spectacles higher up his nose and met Bullock’s outraged gaze. He lowered one shoulder against the assault. “I am tired. An exhaustion of the kind I highly doubt you are familiar with Mr. Bullock. My heart is weighted; my brain is worn to the thinnest sliver of alertness. My body requires sleep.”

“Doc....” Sol stepped into the space at Seth’s side.

“Mr. Starr.” Doc could feel a tremor of nervousness run up his spine and down into the trembling of his fingers. He wanted these two to go away, leave him, let him hunch through his door and find a bottle of something strong and vile and allow that liquid to help him fall face-first onto his bed and perhaps the fantastical possibility of his eyes closing would finally become a reality. Temporary though it would surely be.

“We came, too late apparently, to ready the Reverend’s body for burial.” Seth’s words were clipped and brutal.

Amos sucked his lower lip beneath his strong top teeth and bit hard. It was as he feared. “May we please go inside so that we can discuss this in private?”

Sol reached out and nudged Seth’s arm, indicating the other should step aside. Doc watched as their gazes met, Bullock’s fury seeming to fade slowly but steadily, and then he was stepping aside, towards Sol, and Doc reached around him and pressed open the door.

The spectres followed him into his home.

He ignored them, walked to a low table and pressed his hands flat onto its surface. His neck was cricked and he stretched his back long, rolling his head on his shoulders, looking down and remembering that this was the surface upon which he had autopsied the Reverend just hours before. He straightened as though bitten and the vertebrae in his neck howled. He turned slowly. Starr had his hat in both hands, shoulders lowered, a typical posture. Bullock was fierce and as poised as the rattler before it strikes. Amos could feel the allure of mesmerization.

Cochran held out both hands. “It is too late to bury the body of that poor man. Why is this so offensive to your sensibilities?” He addressed Seth.

“A proper burial was the right thing to do. It’s what he would have wanted. It’s what he deserved.” Bullock’s voice was so low that Doc wanted to lean into the words but the look on the other man’s face kept him still.

Sol was nodding apologetically beside Seth. “He believed in a bodily resurrection.”

“And you believe he wanted to be risen from the grave with his brain cavity emptied and washed clean?”

Seth took a dangerous step forward but Doc’s outrage was holding him fast in place. He turned quick and angry eyes on Bullock. “I autopsied him this afternoon. That is what he would have wanted. To have the source of his madness revealed. The curtain on his affliction drawn back. And I found the tumour. Like the sprouted apple seed within the fleshy core, coiled white and thick around his mind.” His anger released him and he turned his back on them, walked away, reaching for the jar. He grabbed at it, fingers sure and fast around the slick surface. He returned, brandishing it like a weapon at Bullock. Tamping down the urge to smash it into this other man’s face, break his teeth, feel the jaw bone splinter beneath the heavy glass, flesh rent with broken shards. “Behold, the handiwork of a cruel god or a capricious devil. I cannot say for certain. Here. I dare you to look at it, look into the fact of the cause of this poor man’s blindness and that which drove him insane.”

Doc watched Sol turn his face away, throat constricting as he swallowed hard. Seth had his gaze trained on him, but a twitching of his left eyelid gave him slightly away. Cochran released a breath he had not known he was holding.

“There is no religious mythologizing here. Not in a bath of formaldehyde. As you see. I am sorely grieved by this show of,” he paused, studying the two men before him, “friendship, and this loyalty that would suggest I am of a monstrous nature. An unfeeling sawbones who rendered the body of your friend not fit for a proper burial. Surely, you must realize - you must know it is not a physical possibility, on this plane, that the particles of the dead body can revivify.”

“You fed him to pigs, Doctor.”

Cochran slid his eyes closed; the accusation a blade between his ribs, the tempered tip buried in a chamber of his worn-out heart. He nodded, eyes still shut. “I fed the medically flayed body of the Reverend to pigs. This is something of which I am most positively guilty.”

He swayed slightly, then opened his eyes and realized he had the jar in one hand, the other hand fast on the table top, holding himself. He walked to the far wall, set the jar down, but kept it coralled between his hands. Behind him he heard the door open then shut, the latch fastened securely from the outside, a small act of unconscious consideration. He stared down into the floating mass, eyes narrowed, studying the shape of it. Then he straightened and walked slowly, an agonizing journey, to the locked cabinet. He droppered laudanum into a standing glass of water, tossing it back as though it were a shot of the liquor he had eschewed.

He turned down the spirit lamp, shaking his head, and found his bed in the dark. He sat heavily, his mind already beginning to unravel into strands of cotton. Bending over, his neck still biting with pain, he unlaced his boots and toed them off. Then he lay down, fully dressed and crossed his arms over his chest, laced his fingers together and could not say whether his eyes were open or closed but he knew he was tripping over into a dream state. He wondered, briefly, if he would sleep.

His was a damned soul and he ushered in the descent into his personal hell. The Reverend may not rise bodily from a shallow grave in the hard pack out on the edge of the camp, but he most certainly would walk a while with the good Doctor in the dark hours descending.

Far off in the night, someone began playing "The Saints Go Marching In" on the new piano in The Gem.


End file.
